


Seven Devils

by GoldStarGrl



Category: Silicon Valley (TV)
Genre: Backstory, Foster Care, Gen, M/M, Pining, Section fic, Teen Years, Unrequited Love, mild violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-21
Updated: 2015-07-21
Packaged: 2018-04-10 10:18:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4388060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoldStarGrl/pseuds/GoldStarGrl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Technically, he's lived in close to two dozen places in his twenty-eight years. However, these seven were the standouts. </p><p>Or, six foster homes and an air mattress in Palo Alto.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Seven Devils

1.

Here are the things he remembers about the first home.

The foster mother he was placed with was named Sabrina. It was when his mom’s cancer was getting really bad, and she was living in the hospice. He was four.

He also remembers Raphael, her boyfriend, who had a lot of white power tattoos for someone who was technically Hispanic, spent most every night there.

The next part, he’s not so sure if he remembers, or if therapists just talk about it so much he’s conjured up a _Dateline_ -esque reenactment, was Raphael pinning him against the crib he was slightly too big to sleep in comfortably, big flat hands pushing down on his windpipe. Hard.

“Close the window you little shit! I told you to keep that fucking window closed!”

He remembers trying to say it wasn’t him, he wasn’t touching the window, but not being able to get his throat to cooperate. He remembers - maybe- the edges of his visions starting to go dark and fuzzy.

But then Sabrina ripped Raphael off of him, and the two screamed and made loud grunting noises in the next room for nearly an hour. Sabrina came back in and gave Jared a Tootsie Pop if he promised not to tell anyone what happened.

He didn’t. He didn’t want to disappoint anyone else, but his social worker Gloria came the next day and took him back anyway.

He had red marks around his neck that a policeman took pictures of.

He spends seventy-two hours sleeping in the dank drunk tank at the 54th precinct on the edge of the Bronx where some sympathetic police officer brought him chips from the vending machine and lets him play Tetris on her computer. Gloria picks him up to take him to his mother’s funeral on his third afternoon there, and they never went back.

 

2.

The Goldmans are far and away Jared’s favorite foster family.

Mr. and Mrs. Goldman are both lawyers at big firms on the Upper East Side, working mostly in intellectual property and patent law. They’re not around the house much, but the fridge always has lots of food and there’s a little box on the wall that makes the apartment hot or cold as you want. Their only daughter Rachel is fourteen, and she spends most time in her room or out with friends much more subdued than the three little kids running around her house.

It’s a big, beautiful house. Jared notices it’s elegance, even as a nine-year-old. It’s plush carpets, wide windows with screens, and best of all, the shelves and shelves of books. Jared loves to read. He doesn’t own any books of his own, but he always keeps the ones he borrows in excellent condition. At every elementary school he attends, the librarians dote on him.

Rachel doesn’t take much notice of most of the kids, but she seems to appreciate how quiet he is, how he doesn’t knock over vases or scream at Ronye to give back the shoelaces he systematically steals from everyone in the house. She picks a couple of chapter books off a high shelf when she catches him on his tip toes one afternoon, fingers straining for the spine.

“Hey Donnie. Watcha doing?”

He drops down, flushing.

“I didn’t mean to- I’m sorry.” He tells the polished floor. But Rachel doesn’t seem mad, just presses them into his hand.

“This is one of my favorites. I cry every time I read it.” She jabs her finger at a thin volume. He hugs _The Diary of Anne Frank_ to his chest like it was made of gold.

He reads it about sixteen times before his tenth birthday and talks about it endlessly to anybody who stands still long enough. One of his best days ever is when Rachel laughs and tells him he can keep it.

“Thank you.” He says breathlessly.

When the Goldmans announced they’re getting divorced, he cries his eyes out. Not just because this means he has to leave, Gloria coming to fetch him just a few days after he turns twelve, but because it made Rachel so upset. Someone so nice shouldn’t be in tears. He hugs her tight as they leave and tries to return her books. She shakes her head.

“Wha...? No-don’t worry about-they’re all yours, Donnie.” She smiles under shiny eyes.

 _"I truly believe people are good at heart."_  He underlines that line in red pen that night as he sits in Gloria’s car.

 

3.

Gloria decides to try and move him out of the city for high school, something for which he was immensely grateful. New York City is an amazing place, but trees and grass lawns outside of Central Park are stunning to him. And so many animals!

When his foster father at the Coopmans locks him outside one night for talking during the Yankees game, he wanders through the woods behind their ramshackle farm house and watches the squirrels and little night birds flit through the branches and take off into the sky.

They fly so fast, disappear against the dark sky too quickly for the moon to notice, it’s light to catch them again. He sees an owl nestled on a tree branch that night, and something about it’s presence is calming. He leans against the trunk supporting it and tries to rest until the school bus shows up a few hours later.

At school, he’s the weird pale kid who’s clothes are faded and too small (Rhoda, his foster mother, just laughed when she noticed he was growing too tall for his pants), but he doesn’t mind. Not having anywhere to sit in the cafeteria just frees him up to walk around the perimeter of the school and watch the birds fly by.

Sometimes he brings _Anne Frank_ to reread, but after a while he goes to the librarian and asks for some books on bird identification. She melts and helps him pick out a _Beginner's Guide to Bird Watching_ and tells him to keep it as long as he wants. He’s still got it with this crowd.

Beautifully, Mr. Coopman tries to set Jared’s foster sister Suzanne on fire while drunk and the DSS shows up a few hours later, before the scorch marks on the kitchen floor can be covered.

Jared tells Gloria about the red-beaked finch he saw that morning on the car ride back to the city.

 

4.

Jared thinks he might like guys.

Maybe. There’s a boy - Robert - at PS 84 who sits in front of him in math class with bright blue eyes and he just can’t stop staring at him. Sometimes Robert asks to copy Jared’s beautifully written notes on fractions and unit circles and Jared’s stomach does a little twist.

“You’ve got kind of girly handwriting.” He comments once, cracking a teasing smile. Jared feels himself blink, slightly stung. He thought he had neat handwriting, perfect blocky letters. Gloria had always complimented him on it when she watched him do homework at the police station or the Child Protective Services office. Besides, was girly supposed to be an insult?

He mentions this at the Gutz’s apartment that night and Bill tells him to stop acting like a faggot. So he swallows the questions and sits quietly on the musty couch while _Wheel of Fortune_ bathes them in blue light and wonders what it’s like to be kissed.

He wants to refuse Robert the notes the next time he asks but can’t bring himself to do it. He doesn’t want to make him sad or angry. He has a feeling Robert might react the same way as Bill, if he found out what was going on in Jared's head.

Gloria taught him how to drive the summer before, which is convenient because he needs a quick getaway when Bill and Edna start screaming in some angry foreign language when they find his much loved copy of _Anne Frank_ amongst his schoolbooks, throwing shoes and silverware at his face. He’s out of subway tokens, so he calmly takes Edna’s car and drives to the police station, where Gloria picks him up late that night.

“Do you think I might be able to go back upstate?" He asks her, his thin arms wrapped around himself, his too tight button down not cutting it against the November wind.

Gloria pinches her nose and sighs. “I’ll see what I can do.”

 

5.

Ratnakar and Pekai Jakhrani are very strict, but not in a bad way.

They have two kids of their own as well as Jared and two foster daughters, and very day after school they make all five children sit down at the kitchen table, and they’re not allowed to get back up until their homework is done.

Buthra and Shanti complain and Louise and Marta sometimes pitch fits and throw things, but Jared doesn’t mind. He’s good at school, and he likes making Mrs. and Mr. Jakhrani happy by bringing home As on his report cards. Pekai sometimes slips him candy for being so compliant and studious. She dotes on him, more than her own children, because he is a boy. He doesn't think is totally fair, but he also thinks free candy is a ridiculous thing for a seventeen-year-old to get so excited about, and here he is. None amoung us are perfect.

When Buthra, who is a year above him in school, gets accepted to one of the Seven Sisters, her parents make all the children drive to Vassar and help her move in. Ratnakar tells Jared, Louise and Marta twice on the ride over that the stipends the DSS sends for them are the reason Buthra can afford to go here - Pekai clarifies that this is supposed to be a compliment.

Jared gets chills walking onto the campus, sweeping and ivy covered. Ratnakar catches his eye and nods.

“This is the reward for people who work hard.” He says, and even though high school graduation is nine months away, Jared starts filling out the common application when they get home that night.

That May he officially ages out of the foster system, which means he can leave the state without filling out a stack of paperwork for the first time since he was four, but he only travels as far as Poughkeepsie - he’s not one to be greedy, try to swallow the whole country at once.

 

6.

Jared Dunn loves Vassar.

He love love _loves_ it.

It’s beautiful and serene, with plenty of places to birdwatch and go for walks. He makes lots of friends - lots of female friends, which made him a little anxious at first, but he soon relaxes when he realizes most of them are also gay and have no intention of trying to sleep with him.

In the next dorm over Emily and Shoshana live, and they take him to their crew tournament and he falls in love with the sport. A _sport_ someone built like him is actually good at.

So suddenly Jared has activities to go to and enough food to eat and people who like him for him, not just because the DSS was sending them a check every month.

He works for idealistic congressional campaigns and goes drinking at lesbian bars and even has his first kiss, a dark eyed bartender named Reid who turns out to be a tool who did it for tips but it’s still slobbery and weird and _glorious_.

For the first time, he doesn’t feel like some perverse little orphan Annie because everyone in college is living on their own. He visits Gloria in the city a few times, despite the fact that he’s no longer her problem, and she smiles and hugs him and tells him how well he’s looking.

It’s only at the end of semester, when everybody else’s moms and dads and siblings come to help pack up their stuff and take them back to sleep in their childhood beds that he realizes his friends' independence was only an illusion- they all had safety nets.

He stays as a summer RA and swallows hard, trying to convince himself the isolation is normal. He thinks a lot about Otto Frank, Anne’s father, the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust. _At least that didn’t happen to you._ He lectures himself, on nights when his twin bed feels too big and cold. _It’s harder to have something and lose it than to have been without since the beginning. Probably._

When he graduates he hugs his girlfriends so hard they lose oxygen and then proceeds to have a very self-indulgent cry in his car for two hours after the ceremony.

 _Get it together Donald, who told you that you could cry? No one cares about your widdle baby feelings!_ A voice in his head that sounds a lot like Mr. Coopman rants at him until he wipes his eyes on the cuffs of his only dress shirt, realizing, suddenly, that he’s twenty-two years old. He's done with school. He’s allowed to leave the state of New York. There is literally nothing keeping him here.

_"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world!"_

So he takes a deep breath and drives, and doesn’t stop until he hits another ocean, sparkling and warm.

 

7.

Richard is only twenty-six, that’s true, but Jared privately thinks that’s still a little old to have your bedroom decorated like the freshman dorm at MIT, all indie band posters and math puns tacked on the wall and a loft bed, for goodness sake. Jared hasn't slept in a bunk bed since the Goldmans. Not that he'd ever disparage Richard about it.

He can only see his friend lying in profile from where he sleeps down on an air mattress, one of the more comfortable he’s ever been sent to. He looks like he’s being raised to the heavens, his curly hair tousled against his dark sheets, his legs crunched up against his chest, his ratty gray Stanford sweatshirt making the edges of his arms and shoulders fuzzy and soft and warm.

" _Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy._ " If Jared were edgy and decadent enough, he would get that line driven into his skin in dark ink. For now, he settles on repeating it over and over again in his mind as he watches Richard breathe, his brow unfurrowed, if only for now.

_“Oh Donald, I loved your old apartment, it was so...clean.” Gloria had said when Jared invited her over for dinner his first month working at Pied Piper, after he made sure Dinesh and Gilfoyle were out so he wouldn’t disturb them with a guest._

 _She had moved west to spend more time with her son and granddaughter, but Jared couldn't help but steal a few of her evenings every so often, even if it was selfish and juvenile._

_Her social worker eyes reacted compulsively, and he saw her notch the moldy exposed beams overhead, the cluttered tables and elaborate drug paraphernalia. He felt a swell a warmth at her true kindness, that she still worried about her charges living situations, even when they’d been out of the system for nearly eleven years._

_It’s true the one bedroom he bought while working at Hooli had a bay window and central heating. The landlord had even installed granite countertops. It was a lovely place to be alone._

_“Oh, I don’t know.” He’d said. “It’s not so bad here.”_

_Jared had had enough of being alone._

Richard mumbles and twists in a dream, exposing his lovely pale neck. And Jared feels his lips press tight together, his eyes unable to look away. Maybe he wasn't... _with_ someone...but he was _near_ him, safe and warm. What more could he ask for in a place to live?

 _I’ve got a great view_. He thinks, and he drifts off to sleep easy, his bare feet hanging from the mattress brushing against the threadbare carpet.


End file.
